Very Solid Audio

dweekly

1998/12/11

The Japan-based Kobe Steel has apparently entered into a licensing agreement with NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, basically Japan’s AT&T) for rights to use the TwinVQ

codec in a portable digital audio player called “SolidAudio.” TwinVQ, also known by its file extension .VQF, was developed separately from MP3 technology. This is in

contrast to AAC, which extends MP3 technology. While AAC has a small

technical edge over TwinVQ, both sound distinctively better than

MP3 at equivalent bitrates.

I got a chance to test out the prototype SolidAudio player and interview one of the DSP engineers, Toshiaki Shimoda, about a week ago. I brought both my Rio and my friend Nathan Schmidt (hardware guru) to the interview: both proved very useful in making comparisons between the devices. While Toshi (as he liked to be called) didn’t let us take pictures, we were allowed to measure the device and play around with it. It was roughly the size of a credit card and was half the thickness of the Rio. The device comes with a very cute docking station for recharging the internal lithium ion battery.

It uses SmartMedia flash cards to store the .VQF files, obviating the need for a direct PC link. Toshi demonstrated loading the flash card into a special, hollow floppy disk

to make a computer believe that the flash is actually a

floppy! (The “flash floppy” is called Flash Path and

costs about US$70 in Japan) We were able to place files

onto the flash card simply by copying the .VQF files of

our choice to the floppy drive. The player takes the names

of the .VQF files and displays them as the song plays in

a 1″ x 2″ LCD panel on the front of the player.

The player had very small buttons for changing the volume,

skipping tracks, playing, stopping, fast-forwarding, and

rewinding. There were also two buttons that didn’t do

anything. Yet. Toshi suggested that they could serve a

variety of purposes in the production release, although

Kobe had not yet fully decided what functionality to incorporate. The output is through a supertiny headphone jack, a form factor becoming popular in Japan. Toshi had a converter on hand for US headphones, thankfully.

major US hardware firm to support MP3, took flak from the RIAA on the grounds of supporting piracy. Diamond fired back that the RIAA “had damaged Diamond’s credibility” and was guilty of “unlawful business practices.” While Diamond was not prevented from manufacturing their Rio device, prospective device manufacturers are taking care to approach the RIAA gingerly before coming to market, lest they be sued, too.